Enabling learners to successfully use their second language (L2) in meaningful ways is a critical goal of instruction. Ultimately, most learners want to meet the L2 demands of the contexts in which they will use the language. To accomplish this, learners must develop linguistic knowledge and apply it in a manner that is contextually appropriate…

The authors present a project that aims at understanding the way language learners write in social media in their every day lives using the target language. How do our students proceed when writing a Social Network Site (SNS) post? What resources do they use for references on word, sentences and text level? By answering these and related questions…

According to Swain, Kinnear, & Steinman (2011), we use a language with others as a form of shared cognition, and in the process we scaffold each other. This action research investigates how students' online written output affects each other's writing. One thousand twenty online entries written by 21 Japanese university sophomore English majors…

Despite having studied English for some 33 months, the students at the private junior high school in Japan described in this paper had never before been asked to write original compositions in the language. The researchers undertook a quasi-experimental pilot study in which the 156 (n= 156) participants were each asked to write four compositions,…

This research introduces unique parallel corpora to uncover linguistic behaviors in L2 argumentative writing in the exact correspondence to their appropriate forms provided by English native speakers (NSs). The current paper targets at the mysterious behavior of I think in argumentative prose. I think is regarded as arguably problematic and…